Yayoi Kusama is the leading contemporary artist in Japan today. She is famous for becoming famous in New York in the 1950’s and 1960’s, through her Happening’s performances, amazing large-scale paintings and phallic sculptures, as well as her publicity seeking and actual publications. She purportedly dated famous New York artists yet she is supposedly celibate yet her work pours from pure raw sexual energies. In the 1960’s she took her work to the Venice Biennale even though she was not invited, which is exactly what New York City 1980’s superstar Jeff Koons would do to get his own work seen in an international context a few decades later. She is known for having said she is trying to cure her mental illnesses with her art. She has said she wants her work seen in an international context and not as Japanese, and certainly not askawaii “cute” culture coming from Japan today. Kusama’s path reminds me of Yoko Ono’s, another wealthy independent woman from Japan who moved to New York and had an art studio. Yoko Ono’s work was accepted by the New York art world as art, even while she was attacked for daring to produce art music. Kusama’s work is sometimes discussed relative to Minimalism, yet for me the erasure of the body and the sexual being in Minimalism is completely counter to Kusama’s highly sexually charged body and Happenings of the 1960’s in New York.(Vincent Johnson in Los Angeles)

“In 1948 Kusama entered a four-year course of study at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts, where she “signed up for the Nihonga or Japanese-style painting course but found it “unbearable” and often missed classes. She left Kyoto after two years and by 1955 had established herself as a prominent artist in Japan, with some acclaimed solo exhibitions on her resume. But she had also grown tired of a country “too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women.” In her view, “My art needed a more unlimited freedom, and a wider world.”

“Frequently appearing on tabloid covers and TV talk shows in New York, she became known as the Queen of the Hippies for her pro-sex and antiwar work that attracted young followers. Not only did she direct flag-burning and body-painting events (where she invited people to take off their clothes and paint polka dots on one another’s bodies) but she also provided her hippie friends with lodging and fun work through various commercial enterprises, such as Kusama Fashion Company (fashion design), Kusama Orgy (a weekly newspaper) and KOK (a gay social club). Her first film, Kusama’s Self- Obliteration (1968), a collaboration with director Jud Yalkut, won several international film awards. But above all, her fashion business burgeoned, with her garments—featuring holes that revealed sexual parts—selling in some 400 stores, including Bloomingdale’s.” (Art in America)

This geometric abstraction painting is amazing in is regularity and repetition.

Yayoi Kusama painting from the mid-sixties

NHK, Japan’s state broadcaster, filmed a three-hour documentary about the artist, chronicling an 18-month period in which Kusama completed a hundred paintings, some of which will be shown at the Tate.

“Kusama with “Love Forever” buttons, which she distributed at the opening of Kusama’s Peep Show, a mirror-lined environmental installation at Castellane Gallery. New York, 1966. Photograph by Hal Reiff.”

‘She does not want to be associated with other commercially successful Japanese artists, such as Yoshitomo Nara or Takashi Murakami. “Such Japanese art is categorised as kawaii culture,” she says, wrinkling up her nose at the word for “cute” that has come to define an entire genre. “I have never seen my art as kawaii like that. I don’t want to be seen as a Japanese artist. I just want to be able to explore my art freely in an international context.”’ Financial Times London magazine

“When Kusama arrived in New York in 1958, the city’s powerful art scene was still in thrall to the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. The net paintings she began producing shortly after her arrival, and first exhibited the following year, were therefore received as a major revelation. Abstract expressionist critic Dore Ashton called her show a ‘striking tour de force’,2 while Sidney Tillim declared the artist ‘one of the most promising new talents to appear on the New York scene in years’.3…

Donald Judd observed on first encountering the works, her net paintings took the expansive colour fields of ‘cooler’ abstractionists like Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman as a point of departure, but added something entirely new. In his review of the exhibition for Art News, Judd described the paintings as ‘strong, advanced in concept and realised’. ” Reuben Keehan, Curator, Contemporary Asian Art,
Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art

Yayoi Kusama, Lingering Dreams (1949)

Grady Turner/BOMB magazine on Yayoi Kusama in her interview of 1998:

In 1998 in BOMB magazine, Grady Turner interviewed Yayoi Kusama about her life and works: She said: “Yes, my family is quite wealthy. They operate real estate and storage businesses. They also wholesale seeds harvested from the plants grown on their large farms. They have been in this business for some 100 years….All of my siblings told me to become a collector rather than a painter….By translating hallucinations and fear of hallucinations into paintings, I have been trying to cure my disease….When I left for New York, my mother gave me one million yen and told me never to set foot in her house again. I destroyed several thousand pieces of work. I felt those early works would be a drag on me after I became determined to create better work in the United States. Now I regret very much that I destroyed them….(she saved) 2,000 thousand works, which you brought to New York….The pieces that I saved were all completed ones, similar to those I had sent to Kenneth and Georgia O’Keeffe. (When I first wrote to O’Keeffe for advice, she discouraged me from moving to New York. After I arrived in New York, though, she was very supportive of me, visiting me at my studio to see how I was doing, trying to find galleries that might be interested in my art and buyers of my work. She even invited me to stay at her place.) Those pieces I saved were excellent pieces that already showed some signs of dots and Infinity Nets….When I arrived in New York, action painting was the rage, de Kooning, Pollock and others. I wanted to be completely detached from that and start a new art movement. I painted obsessional, monochromatic paintings from morning till night. They were huge paintings that had no composition like a 33-foot white infinity net painting. My only contact with the art world was John Gordon of the Brooklyn Museum….I participated in a group show held at the Green Gallery in June 1962 with Robert Morris, Warhol, George Segal, James Rosenquist and Oldenburg who I hold in high regard. Oldenburg showed a papier-maché sculpture then. The Green Gallery offered me a chance to hold a solo show in September of the same year, but unfortunately I had to decline due to lack of money. During that summer, Oldenburg was working fast to create soft sculptures similar to mine using machine-sewn forms. When I went to the opening of his solo show held at the Green Gallery the same year, his wife led me to his piece Calendar and said to the effect, “Yayoi, I am sorry we took your idea.” I was surprised to see the work almost identical to my sculpture…. Kusama staged dozens of Happening called “Body Festivals”—in her studio and in public spaces around New YorkIn 1968, Kusama began to refer to her Happenings as “Anatomic Explosions.”

Kusama has said: “America is really the country that raised me, and I owe what I have become to her,” she wrote. Within a year she was ready to strike out on her own, telling a Japanese magazine, “I am planning to create a revolutionary work that will stun the New York art world.”

“The revolution came in the form of lace-like paintings that she called “infinity nets”. She filled huge canvases, sometimes more than 30ft-long, with endlessly repeated white loops of paint. Though it must not have looked that way at the time, the “infinity nets” were to become her defining creation. She sold some for as little as $200. Fifty years later, one of her “infinity net” paintings, No. 2, was auctioned at Christie’s. It fetched $5.1m, a record sum for a living female artist.”

“One day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness. As I realized it was actually happening and not just in my imagination, I was frightened. I knew I had to run away lest I should be deprived of my life by the spell of the red flowers. I ran desperately up the stairs. The steps below me began to fall apart and I fell down the stairs straining my ankle”

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli´s Field, 1965, sekatekniikka. (detalji) (the work was lost after Kusama left New York for Japan in 1973)

Narcissus Garden by Yayoi Kusama, a version of this was shown at the 1966 Venice Biennial, where Kusama offered the 1,500 mirrored balls for sale at 1200 lire ($2 each). She was prohibited from doing this and gave out leaflets praising her own work as she had crashed event wearing a golden kimono.

“In the late 1960s Ms Kusama started creating performances that brought her fame and disrepute in equal measure. Called “Body Paint Festivals” or “Self-Obliteration Happenings”, these events consisted of naked dancing hippies (who were often covered in polka dots) burning flags or simulating sex, or both. Somehow Ms Kusama, a celibate, became a proponent of the sexual-liberation movement. It was not a high point in her career—at least not aesthetically.” (from the Cosmic Queen article)

Kusama’s Self-Obliternation photographs on ink of 1967 follow:

“Kusama’s mode of expression expanded from the likes of painting and performance in an environmental direction, employing entire spaces and extinguishing the contours of objects contained therein with nets and polka dots. In her 1963 solo exhibition at the Gertrude Stein Gallery titled ‘Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show’, 999 black-and-white photographs of a 10-metre boat covered in sprouting, stuffed, phallus-like objects were stuck all over the floor, walls and ceiling of the gallery, while in 1964’s ‘Driving Image Show’ exhibition, the floor was covered in macaroni. In Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field 1965, she presented a room made from mirrors and plastic, and in the 1966 exhibition titled ‘Kusama’s Peep Show: Endless Love Show’ she showed Endless Love Room, consisting of blinking red, white, green and blue lights in a hexagonal-shaped, mirrored room.“Mami Kataoka is Chief Curator, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.

Anti-war Naked Happening’, New York, 1968

flag-burning-naked-orgy protest. Brookyln Bridge, NYC 1968

Christie’ s New York sold a work of Kasuma’ s in 2008 for $5.1 million, a record for a living female artist.

I can’t begin to explain my fascination with Yayoi Kusama, nor do I believe she would want me to. Kusama is one of Japan’s most prolific artists, and is best known for her massive Infinity Net paintings, her sculptures, her performance art, and her installations. She is also a novelist, a poet, and a fashion designer. Kusama’s artwork is a constant exploration of the way she sees the world, and a meticulous examination of the “single dot” in the universe that is her own life. As Ali Smith wrote in Tate Etc., “For [Kusama], art is a fertile bleed, something which spreads on to the walls, the floor, out into the room, all over the self. Mindscape and landscape are the same in her work, a reminder that we are all where we live, that we make what surrounds us as much as it makes us.”

1. Yayoi Kusama’s childhood in rural Japan was “like a nightmare” (her words in issue 10 of Lula, not mine). Born in 1929 to an abusive mother, she experienced continual hallucinations throughout her childhood, and was prone to morbid obsessions. The first subjects to appear in Kusama’s earliest paintings from childhood were her mother, the sun, the moon, and clouds.

2. Kusama left Japan for New York City in 1958 and spent several years entrenched in the art scene; she exhibited with everyone from Donald Judd to Andy Warhol, and was friendly with Georgia O’Keeffe.

3. In the sixties, Kusama opened a boutique where she sold her own mod clothing designs, many of which were made from see-through materials. Nudity was common in much of her work at the time, and the shop included private studios where models would have their bodies painted and photographed.

4. In 1968, Kusama designed a bridal gown for two men to wear at their wedding, which took place at Kusama’s Church of Self-Obliteration and was directed by the artist herself, who had been dubbed the “High Priestess of Polka Dots.” Polka dots—which represent disease for Kusama—started appearing as motifs in her paintings around age 10; they are present in many of her works, including street performances that involved painting polka dots on nude men and women.

5. Kusama calls her work “psychosomatic,” and continually explores the themes of eternity, emptiness, hallucination, obsession, compulsion, accumulation, and repetition, among others. In her thirties, she focused in particular on entropy, sensuality, and femininity through a surrealist lens.

6. In addition to her autobiography, Infinity Net, Kusama has written eight novels and countless poems.

7. Throughout the late 1960s, Kusama staged over 200 “Happenings” in public spaces around New York City and throughout Europe. The performances included body painting festivals, fashion shows, orgies, and anti-war demonstrations. When she moved back to Japan, Kusama began staging performances on temple grounds in Tokyo—for one, she toilet-papered a graveyard.

8. In 1968, the artist launched Kusama Fashion Company Ltd., and sold her avant-garde clothing and accessory line in “Kusama Corner” at Bloomingdale’s in New York. She staged fashion shows in Rome, Paris, Belgium, and Germany.

9. Kusama moved back to Japan in 1973 to focus on her health and to pursue a more peaceful artistic lifestyle than New York City would allow. Since the mid-1970s, she has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital, and continues to create artwork in a studio nearby.

10. In order to create a body of work that she feels will leave an impact on future generations, Kusama would like to live to be at least 200 or 300 years old. As long as she has the energy to continue creating, she will carry on.

Three new paintings are added to the Cosmos Suite by Vincent Johnson on 2.24.2013. These are the 7th, 8th and 9th paintings created in the Cosmos Suite. They are also the 4th, 5th and 6th large scale paintings in this body of work.

These Cosmos Suite paintings by Los Angeles base artist Vincent Johnson are created using various experiments in media and paint application. Johnson has done substantial research into the area of the history of painting materials and there use, and employs this knowledge in the production of his work.

There are now a total of nine paintings in the Cosmos Suite. Six of the nine paintings are thirty by forty inches in size. Three of the paintings – the originals in the suite, are twenty by twenty four inches in size. Each painting takes about a month to create as there is a three week drying time between the first and second layers of the painting. As the suite grows there will be additional sizes including larger works.

used sponges on side and surface of the painting. used large brushwork. Layered canvas in paint.

Poured Liquin in between stripes of pure paint color to canvas, mixed with paint rags, dabbed till thick paint areas are leveled out. Started out with thick brush in corner to mix, abandoned this quickly.

Vincent Johnson received his MFA in Fine Art Painting from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California 1997 and his BFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a 2005 Creative Capital Grantee, and was selected for the Baum: An Emerging American Photographer’s Award in 2004 and for the New Museum of Contemporary Arts Aldrich Art Award in 2007 and for the Art Matters grant in 2008, and in 2009 for the Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship, Los Angeles. In 2010 he was named a United States Artists project artist. His work has been reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, Art in America, Art Slant and many other publications. His photographic works were most recently shown in the inaugural Pulse Fair Los Angeles. His most recent paintings were shown at the Beacon Arts Center in Los Angeles. His 2010 photo project – California Toilet, Filthy Light Switch, is in exhibition at Another Year in LA gallery in West Hollywood through early March 2013. His work has appeared in several venues, including The Studio Museum in Harlem (Freestyle (2001, The Philosophy of Time Travel, 2007, and The Bearden Project, 2011-2012), PS1 Museum, Queens, NY, SK Stiftung, Cologne, Germany, Santa Monica Museum of Art, LAXART, Las Cienegas Projects, Boston University Art Museum, Kellogg Museum, Cal Poly Pomona.

This new painting series is part of my ongoing exploration of painting materials and techniques from the history of painting. The works combine knowledge of painting practices of both abstract and representation paintings. The works concern themselves purely with the visual power that paintings can do through the manipulation of paint. Some of the underpaintings are allowed to dry for months; some of those are built dark to light, others light to dark. None are made in a single setting. Most are worked and reworked using studio materials. Each new series takes a different approach to the painted surface from how the paint is applied, to varying the painting mediums. This suite concerns itself with the layering of paint by building up the surface and altering and reworking the wet paint with studio tools.

Two larger paintings will be completed and photographed on Sunday, July 15, 2012 and posted here.

http://www.vincentjohnsonart.com
Vincent Johnson received his MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California 1997 and his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Painting 1986. He started out as a student in Pratt’s painting department. He is a 2005 Creative Capital Grantee, and was nominated for the Baum: An Emerging American Photographer’s Award in 2004 and for the New Museum of Contemporary Arts Aldrich Art Award in 2007 and for the Art Matters grant in 2008, and in 2009 nominated for Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship, Los Angeles. In 2010 he was named a United States Artists project artist. His work has been reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, Art in America, Art Slant and many other publications. His photographic works were most recently shown in the inaugural Pulse Fair Los Angeles. His most recent paintings were shown at the Beacon Arts Center in Los Angeles. He is currently one of five artists participating in Photography 2013 at Another Year in LA gallery in West Hollywood, California through March 6, 2013. He created a new collage for acclaimed The Bearden Project exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, 2011-2012.

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